Ediborah Yap, the Filipina nurse who was held hostage along with the Burnhams, was earlier promised release by Sayaff spokesman Abu Sabaya. Instead, they killed her, along with Martin Burnham.
Now, why is nothing being done yet?
PHP MIME email class
I just got a PHP class to send MIME email with attachments up and running, and it feels sooo good. (Of course it took me the better part of a whole workday to figure out that it wasn’t working because I’d forgotten to paste in a whole line of code.)
Update: PHPMailer is all you need and more.
Brunching Weblog FAQK
Look! A naked guy painted up like Spider-Man! Naw, I’m just kidding. It’s the Brunching Weblog FAQ(K).
Can I publish a weblog?
You can and you should. Valuable and relevant communication is only possible when you don’t have to put much work into publishing your thoughts. Usenet and talk radio prove this. Thus, many fine programmers are creating ways to get your ideas out there with the barest minimum of effort. Soon you’ll be able to check out your weblog to see what your opinions are without even having to form them.
Philippine Senate Musical Chairs
Musical chairs, in which Winnie Monsod gives us a history of Senate “coups,” and how they differ from the most recent one by a hypocritical obstructionist opposition.
Abu Sayyaf Kidnappers
Find them, annihilate them, says today’s Philstar editorial. Now that the Abu Sayyaf kidnappers are without hostages for bargaining chips, the time to take action is now, now, now. Otherwise they will find further opportunity to kidnap more Filipinos and foreigners, starting yet another hostage crisis. ASAP.
(Right. Not very likely. Not with AFP goons ostensibly getting a cut of the ransom. And even if they weren’t, how many days of bureaucracy will it take them to start moving? A week? A month? Bah.)
Spaceweather
Oooh, Space Weather! I love this kind of information: coronal mass ejections, partial eclipses, moon-planet occultations, and other exciting things happening outside our atmosphere.
Check out this animation of a coronal mass ejection headed towards Earth. You can actually see the clouds of solar material looming towards our planet. So you guys up north might be getting a great show tonight.
Ain’t it great? Truly, “the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
AkoCiKaka
Martin Burnham killed
According to latest news, Abu Sayyaf barbarians executed two hostages — including NTM missionary Martin Burnham — during a military rescue attempt. Gracia Burnham was rescued, but wounded by gunfire. I think I speak for all Christians everywhere in expressing our condolences to the Burnhams and to New Tribes Missions.
So the year-long hostage crisis ends in violence and tragedy — except for Martin Burnham, who at long last enters into his reward. To live is Christ and to die is gain.
NIPR.mil
I noticed a visit from the domain “NIPR.mil” in my stats just now, and I wondered: what US military entity could possibly be interested in my February 2002 archive? There was nothing at the domain itself, but a quick Google search turned up some interesting data on the “NIPR.mil” phenomenon.
difference iso-8859-1 utf-8
For those of you wondering whether your charset should be iso-8859-1 or utf-8, the difference is discussed in this forum thread. (Scroll down or do a term search.) Myself, I use utf-8 character encoding, declared in the <?xml... prologue. (With heredoc to keep it from messing up my PHP.)